Richard Bennett Sydney Hobart 50Th
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ACROSS FIVE DECADES PHOTOGRAPHING THE SYDNEY HOBART YACHT RACE RICHARD BENNETT ACROSS FIVE DECADES PHOTOGRAPHING THE SYDNEY HOBART YACHT RACE EDITED BY MARK WHITTAKER LIMITED EDITION BOOK This specially printed photography book, Across Five Decades: Photographing the Sydney Hobart yacht race, is limited to an edition of books. (The number of entries in the 75th Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race) and five not-for-sale author copies. Edition number of Signed by Richard Bennett Date RICHARD BENNETT OAM 1 PROLOGUE People often tell me how lucky I am to have made a living doing something I love so much. I agree with them. I do love my work. But neither my profession, nor my career, has anything to do with luck. My life, and my mindset, changed forever the day, as a boy, I was taken out to Hartz Mountain. From the summit, I saw a magical landscape that most Tasmanians didn’t know existed. For me, that moment started an obsession with wild places, and a desire to capture the drama they evoke on film. To the west, the magnificent jagged silhouette of Federation Peak dominated the skyline, and to the south, Precipitous Bluff rose sheer for 4000 feet out of the valley. Beyond that lay the south-west coast. I started bushwalking regularly after that, and bought my first camera. In 1965, I attended mountaineering school at Mount Cook on the Tasman Glacier, and in 1969, I was selected to travel to Peru as a member of Australia’s first Andean Expedition. The hardships and successes of the Andean Expedition taught me that I could achieve anything that I wanted. I decided that I was going to be a professional photographer. My love of wild places was the catalyst for my career. It has also had the greatest influence on how I live my life. Wilderness gave me the mindset, and the skills, to create a successful business that revolves around wilderness, light aircraft, photography and the things I love. In 1974 I took a scenic flight over the Sydney Hobart fleet. I took some aerial photographs. That led to a career niche, and a passion, that I love just as much today as I did nearly half a century ago. I love everything about the Sydney Hobart: the many moods of the sea, the sense of participation in a great adventure, the camaraderie, the tactics, sensing the proximity of the elements, the wildness of the sea, the gales, the different light, and the dramatic coastline. All the elements are at play out there. It takes so much planning, yet as a photographer, you have to deal with whatever comes up. For me, yacht race photography is about dramatic seascapes, light, weather and © Alice Bennett timing. It’s about putting all those elements together. The final great pleasure of this project for me, is time invested in crafting a beautiful, moody print that tells a story, not just about the yacht, but the seascape and the elements as well. And for the yachties, nothing preserves their personal Sydney Hobart history like a well-crafted photograph that will last for several generations. 2 3 By 1975, I had enough photography work to be a full-time professional and that’s reflected in the way I had learnt photography by correspondence. One of the lessons was about showing speed in a photograph by I tackled that year’s race. I hired a commercial pilot, Rex Godfrey, and briefed him on my plans to photograph using blur. I went out into the paddock and got my dad to drive his tractor down the hill as fast as it would go. every boat. After chatting, we decided we’d make an event of it. We took our wives with us overnight to I tracked him down the hill, holding the tractor steadily in the view finder while clicking off frames with a slow Flinders Island in Bass Strait, figuring that we’d fly out to the rhumb line in the morning and get the boats shutter speed. When I developed my pictures, the old Massey Ferguson tractor was sharp as a tack while the riding some swell on the forecast north-easter. background was all blurred, just as it was meant to be. I knew I was good at it. I’d had years of practice shooting rabbits with a rifle for pocket money. Twenty pence each. It gave me the skills to track a yacht with a long lens So, early on December 28, I rang the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania. while being battered by 130km/h winds. It doesn’t matter how fast your shutter speeds are. If you can’t track your subject, there’s going to be blur. “G’day, Richard Bennett here. I want to photograph the yachts. Where are the race leaders?” I shot like a marksman. You line up your target, you take in a breath and let half the breath out. You freeze and “Kialoa’s off St Helens.” you concentrate on the target. There’s a conscious thought process with each shot. “Come again.” I thought he said she was off St Helens, which was more than 100 kilometres south of us on So, I took a few shots of Kialoa III with the sun behind those beautiful red, white and blue spinnakers and the the Tasmanian east coast… and there was no way a boat could have got there in such a short time. light gleaming off the waves. We did a circuit then headed over to the American ketch Windward Passage which was only 20 minutes behind. These big, glamorous American boats were a new thing for the Sydney “Kialoa’s going to beat the race record. She’s doing 23 knots and she’s off St Helens.” Hobart and they were strutting their stuff that afternoon. We got in behind Windward Passage and shot her with the wake sizzling out of the stern like a ski boat. It was a great shot that even 20 years later was used as I put the phone down. “Hey Rex, come on.” We raced out to the airstrip and jumped into the Cessna 172 the cover of a magazine. and took off. We worked our way through the fleet, shooting as many as we could find, totally focussed on the fleet. It was afternoon by the time we found Kialoa III off Maria Island, halfway down the coast. And wasn’t she a We landed at Cambridge airport near Hobart in the late afternoon. Rex and I were over the moon. It had been sight to behold. Magnificent! The maxi ketch was flying two spinnakers and a blooper, surfing down on the a great day’s flying for Rex and I knew I had some excellent pictures in the bag, but a sudden realisation took north-easter. With my thoughts on backlight and shadows on the water, I got Rex to drop down and approach the gloss off somewhat. her from the side with the sun behind her. I opened my cockpit window and stuck my 150mm Sonnar lens out and squeezed the shutter button. “Oh Bugger!” I said to Rex as we came in to land. You need to have a feeling for the angles if you want to get sharp edges shooting from the air. If you shoot at “What’s the matter?” right angles to the aeroplane, it’s going to be blurred because of the speed of the aircraft, not to mention the up-and-down movement and the buffeting of the wind on your camera. I took the lens hood off the camera “Maureen and Sue!” We’d left our wives on Flinders Island. to reduce wind drag on it. If you get the pilot to approach at an angle that’s not quite head on and you shoot as far forward as you can from the side of the plane, there’s a brief window where you can get sharpness. 4 5 KIALOA III 1975 Jim Kilroy’s Kialoa III was a wonderful sight to behold. She was planing at 23 knots on her way to breaking the race record in two days, 14 hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds. The record stood for 21 years. 6 7 WINDWARD PASSAGE 1975 One of the most beautiful and timeless yachts of the past 50 years, Windward Passage encountered a wind shift in the 1975 race which the crew had not identified soon enough. They lost 20 minutes and could not make up the time against Kialoa III. Winning this yacht race is not just about going fast, but having the right strategy and adapting to the ever-changing conditions. 8 9 We tore up to Flinders Island the next morning to pick up our wives and then flew out to the rhumb line and picked up a few more boats on our way south. As hard as I would try over the next 40 years and more, I would never actually manage to capture every boat in the race. I got the prints done as fast as you could in those days at the local lab and took them down to Constitution Dock. I think I might have upgraded my display to a desk and easel by then. I saw the owner of Kialoa III, Jim Kilroy, heading towards me with the crew. He was on a high, having set a race record that was going to last for 21 years and I just happened to have that beautiful backlit picture of his boat. I showed him the print and he didn’t need to think about it long.